⠿é and ⠾ú are only coincidentally the French Braille letters for é and ù: They are simply the braille letters of the third decade after z, assigned to print in alphabetical order.

Irish Braille also uses some of the Grade-​11⁄2 shortcuts of English Braille,

ch

gh

sh

th

ed

er

st

ing

ar*

ea

con

dis

com†

en

in

*⠜ only has the value ar in prose. In poetry, it is used to mark a new line, like "/" in print.

†Abolished in Updated Irish Braille (see below)

These shortcuts are not used across elements of compound words. For example, in uiscerian (uisce-rian) "aqueduct", e-r is spelled out, as is s-t in trastomhas (tras-tomhas) "diameter". There are no special braille letters for dotted consonants. The letter h is used instead, as in modern print. A shortcut may be used even when the final consonant is lenited with h; comh, for example, is written ⠤⠓com-h.

The only word-sign is the letter ⠎s for agus "and".

The letters j k q v w x y z were not originally part of the Irish alphabet, but apart from w they have been introduced through English loans, so they occur in Irish Braille. Punctuation is the same as in English Braille.

UIB uses most of the contractions of UEB, with the exception of the doubled letters bb ⠆, cc ⠒, ff ⠖, and gg ⠶. These must be written as ⠃⠃, ⠉⠉, ⠋⠋, and ⠛⠛ respectively. The contractions used are as shown above.

A full set of wordsigns has been added:

Letter

Braille

Word

Letter

Braille

Word

b

⠃

bíonn

bh

⠃⠓

bhíonn

c

⠉

cathain

ch

⠡

chuaigh

d

⠙

déanamh

dh

⠙⠓

dhéanamh

e

⠑

eile

f

⠋

féidir

fh

⠋⠓

fhéidir

g

⠛

gach

gh

⠣

gheobhaidh

h

⠓

halla

l

⠇

leis

m

⠍

maith

mh

⠍⠓

mhaith

n

⠝

nuair

o

⠕

oíche

p

⠏

píosa

ph

⠏⠓

phíosa

r

⠗

raibh

s

⠎

agus

sh

⠩

shampla

t

⠞

tabhair

th

⠹

tháinig

u

⠥

uaireanta

v

⠧

véarsa

(Even when a lenited letter requires two cells, it is treated as one letter in Irish.) In addition, the letters ⠁a, ⠊i, ⠯á, ⠿é, ⠷í, and ⠮ó, along with the digraphs ⠔in and ⠜ar, are Irish words in their own right, and are treated as wordsigns.

The third-decade English wordsigns and, for, of, the, and with are not used as wordsigns nor as contractions. The first three are spelled out ⠁⠝⠙, ⠋⠕⠗, and ⠕⠋, while the last two use the th contraction ⠹⠑ and ⠺⠊⠹. All occurrences of ⠯⠿⠷⠮⠾ in UIB text are for vowels with accents.

1.
Irish language
–
Irish, also referred to as Gaelic or Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people. Irish enjoys constitutional status as the national and first official language of the Republic of Ireland and it is also among the official languages of the European Union. The public body Foras na Gaeilge is responsible for the promotion of the language throughout the island of Ireland and it has the oldest vernacular literature in Western Europe. The fate of the language was influenced by the power of the English state in Ireland. Elizabethan officials viewed the use of Irish unfavourably, as being a threat to all things English in Ireland and its decline began under English rule in the 17th century. In the latter part of the 19th century, there was a decrease in the number of speakers. Irish-speaking areas were hit especially hard, by the end of British rule, the language was spoken by less than 15% of the national population. Since then, Irish speakers have been in the minority, efforts have been made by the state, individuals and organisations to preserve, promote and revive the language, but with mixed results. Around the turn of the 21st century, estimates of native speakers ranged from 20,000 to 80,000 people. In the 2011 Census, these numbers had increased to 94,000 and 1.3 million, there are several thousand Irish speakers in Northern Ireland. It has been estimated that the active Irish-language scene probably comprises 5 to 10 per cent of Irelands population, there has been a significant increase in the number of urban Irish speakers, particularly in Dublin. In Gaeltacht areas, however, there has been a decline of the use of Irish. Údarás na Gaeltachta predicted that, by 2025, Irish will no longer be the language in any of the designated Gaeltacht areas. Survey data suggest that most Irish people think highly of Irish as a marker of identity. It has also argued that newer urban groups of Irish speakers are a disruptive force in this respect. In An Caighdeán Oifigiúil the name of the language is Gaeilge, before the spelling reform of 1948, this form was spelled Gaedhilge, originally this was the genitive of Gaedhealg, the form used in Classical Irish. Older spellings of this include Gaoidhealg in Classical Irish and Goídelc in Old Irish, the modern spelling results from the deletion of the silent dh in the middle of Gaedhilge, whereas Goidelic languages, used to refer to the language family including Irish, comes from Old Irish

2.
Braille
–
Braille /ˈbreɪl/ is a tactile writing system used by people who are blind or visually impaired. It is traditionally written with embossed paper, braille-users can read computer screens and other electronic supports thanks to refreshable braille displays. They can write braille with the slate and stylus or type it on a braille writer, such as a portable braille note-taker. Braille is named after its creator, Frenchman Louis Braille, who lost his eyesight due to a childhood accident, in 1824, at the age of 15, Braille developed his code for the French alphabet as an improvement on night writing. He published his system, which included musical notation, in 1829. The second revision, published in 1837, was the first binary form of writing developed in the modern era, Braille characters are small rectangular blocks called cells that contain tiny palpable bumps called raised dots. The number and arrangement of these dots distinguish one character from another, since the various braille alphabets originated as transcription codes of printed writing systems, the mappings vary from language to language. Braille cells are not the thing to appear in braille text. There may be embossed illustrations and graphs, with the lines either solid or made of series of dots, arrows, bullets that are larger than braille dots, a full Braille cell includes six raised dots arranged in two lateral rows each having three dots. The dot positions are identified by numbers from one through six,64 solutions are possible from using one or more dots. A single cell can be used to represent a letter, number, punctuation mark. In the face of screen-reader software, braille usage has declined, in Barbiers system, sets of 12 embossed dots encoded 36 different sounds. It proved to be too difficult for soldiers to recognize by touch, in 1821 Barbier visited the Royal Institute for the Blind in Paris, where he met Louis Braille. Brailles solution was to use 6-dot cells and to assign a specific pattern to each letter of the alphabet. At first, braille was a transliteration of French orthography, but soon various abbreviations, contractions. The expanded English system, called Grade-2 Braille, was complete by 1905, for blind readers, Braille is an independent writing system, rather than a code of printed orthography. Braille is derived from the Latin alphabet, albeit indirectly, in Brailles original system, the dot patterns were assigned to letters according to their position within the alphabetic order of the French alphabet, with accented letters and w sorted at the end. The first ten letters of the alphabet, a–j, use the upper four dot positions and these stand for the ten digits 1–9 and 0 in a system parallel to Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy

3.
English Braille
–
English Braille, also known as Grade-2 Braille, is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of 250 or so letters, numerals, punctuation marks, formatting marks, contractions, some English Braille letters, such as ⠡ ⟨ch⟩, correspond to more than one letter in print. There are three levels of complexity in English Braille, Grade 1 is a one-to-one transcription of printed English, and is restricted to basic literacy. Grade 2, which is universal in print beyond basic literacy materials, abandons one-to-one transcription in many places. Grade 3 is not a system, but any of various personal shorthands. It is almost never found in publications, most of this article describes the 1994 American edition of Grade-2 Braille, which is largely equivalent to British Grade-2 Braille. Some of the differences with Unified English Braille, which was adopted by various countries between 2005 and 2012, are discussed at the end. Braille was originally intended, and is portrayed, as a re-encoding of the English orthography that is used by sighted people. However, for the blind, braille is an independent writing system, Braille was introduced to Britain in 1861. In 1876, a French-based system with a few hundred English contractions and abbreviations was adopted as the predominant script in Great Britain, however, the contractions and abbreviations proved unsatisfactory, and in 1902 the current grade-2 system, called Revised Braille, was adopted in the British Commonwealth. In 1878, the ideal of basing all braille alphabets of the world on the original French alphabetic order was accepted by Britain, Germany, and Egypt. A partially contracted English Braille, Grade 1½, was adopted in Britain in 1918, in 1991, an American proposal was made for Unified English Braille, intended to eliminate the confusion caused by competing standards for academic uses of English Braille. After several design revisions, it has since adopted by the Commonwealth countries starting in 2005. The chief differences with Revised Braille are in punctuation, symbols, and formatting, more accurately reflecting print conventions in matters such as brackets, mathematical notation, the 64 braille patterns are arranged into decades based on the numerical order of those patterns. In addition, for each there are two additional mirror-image patterns, and finally there are three patterns that utilize only the bottom row of the cell. The final pattern, the empty cell ⟨⠀⟩, is used as a space, cells 1 through 25 plus 40 are assigned to the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet. The other 37 cells, when they are used at all, are used for punctuation and are typically assigned different values in different languages. The English grade-two values are as follows, cells with dots on only the right side do not have equivalents in printed English, and are explained in the notes

4.
Irish orthography
–
Irish orthography has evolved over many centuries, since Old Irish was first written down in the Latin alphabet in about the 8th century AD. Prior to that, Primitive Irish was written in Ogham, Irish orthography is mainly based on etymological considerations, although a spelling reform in the mid-20th century simplified the relationship between spelling and pronunciation somewhat. There are three dialects of spoken Irish, Ulster, Connacht, and Munster, some spelling conventions are common to all the dialects, while others vary from dialect to dialect. In addition, individual words may have in any given dialect a pronunciation that is not reflected by the spelling, modern loanwords also make use of j k q v w x y z. Of these, v is the most common and it occurs in a small number of words of native origin in the language such as vácarnach, vác and vrác, all of which are onomatopoeic. It also occurs in a number of colloquial forms such as víog instead of bíog. It is also the only non-traditional letter used to write foreign names, cork, as the eclipsis of s. K is the only not to be listed by Ó Dónaill. H, when not prefixed to a vowel as an aspirate in certain grammatical functions. The letters names are spelt out thus, á bé cé dé é eif gé héis í eil eim ein ó pé ear eas té ú along with jé cá cú vé wae eacs yé zae, tree names were once popularly used to name the letters. Tradition taught that they all derived from the names of Ogham letters and this alphabet, together with Roman type equivalents and letter name pronunciations along with the additional lenited letters, is shown below. Use of Gaelic type is today almost entirely restricted to decorative and/or self-consciously traditional contexts, the dot above the lenited letter is usually replaced by a following h in the standard Roman alphabet. The only other use of h in Irish is for words after certain proclitics. Although the Gaelic script remained common until the mid-20th century, efforts to introduce Roman characters began much earlier, the consonant letters generally correspond to the consonant phonemes as shown in this table. See Irish phonology for an explanation of the used and Irish initial mutations for an explanation of eclipsis. In most cases, consonants are broad when the nearest vowel letter is one of a, o, u, in spite of the complex chart below, pronunciation of vowels in Irish is mostly predictable from a few simple rules, Fada vowels are always pronounced. Vowels on either side of a vowel are silent. They are present only to satisfy the caol le caol agus leathan le leathan rule

5.
French Braille
–
French Braille is the original braille alphabet, and the basis of all others. The alphabetic order of French has become the basis of the international braille convention, punctuation is as follows, The lower values are readings within numbers. Formatting and mode-changing marks are, As in English Braille, the sign is doubled for all caps. ⟨⠢⟩ and ⟨⠔⟩ are used to begin. This is the internationally recognized number system, however, in French Braille a new system, the Antoine braille digits, is used for mathematics and is recommended for all academic publications. This uses ⠠ combined with the first nine letters of the decade, from ⠠⠡ for ⟨1⟩ to ⠠⠪ for ⟨9⟩. The period/decimal and fraction bar also change, the Antoine numbers are being promoted in France and Luxembourg, but are not much used in with French Braille in Quebec. See the punctuation section above for Antoine mathematical notation, readings have changed slightly since modern braille was first published in 1837. The greatest change has been various secondary readings which were added to the alphabet, in general, only the assignments of the basic 26 letters of the French alphabet are retained in other braille alphabets. For example, among the additional letters, in German Braille only ü and ö coincide with French Braille, however, there are several alphabets which are much more closely related. Flemish Dutch uses the French Braille alphabet, in contrast to the German-derived Netherlands Dutch Braille, Italian Braille is identical to the French apart from doubling up French Braille ò to Italian ó and ò, since French has no ó. Indeed, a difference of these alphabets is the remapping of French vowels with a grave accent to an acute accent. Spanish changes all five of these vowels, as well as taking ü, the continental Scandinavian languages took the extended French letters â, ä/æ, and ö/ø. Vietnamese Braille is also similar, though it has added tone letters, and according uses French ⠵ z for d. Catalan Braille adds ⠇⠐⠇ for print ⟨l·l⟩, and Spanish Braille uses ⠻ for the non-French consonant ñ, luxembourgish Braille has since switch to eight-point braille, adding a dot at point 8 for the three vowels with accents. Punctuation and formatting are in general similar as well, though changes in French punctuation over time means that languages use older French conventions. For example, French parentheses and quotation marks originally had the values they do today. Other changes have accrued over time, and in some cases vary from country to country

6.
1829 braille
–
Louis Brailles original publication, Procedure for Writing Words, Music, and Plainsong in Dots, credits Barbiers night writing as being the basis for the braille script. It differed in a way from modern braille, It contained nine decades of characters rather than the modern five. Braille recognized, however, that the dashes were problematic, being difficult to distinguish from the dots in practice, and those characters were abandoned in the second edition of the book. The first four decades indicated the 40 letters of the alphabet, the fifth the digits, the sixth punctuation, the seventh decade was also used for musical notes. Most of the characters were unassigned. As in modern braille, most of the decades were derived from the first. Decade 5 was not derived from the first, like the first decade, only the top half of the cell was used. The digit 1 was a dash in the top row,2 was dashes in the top and mid rows. 3–5 were a top dash with a left, double, and right dot in the middle, 6–8 were a mid dash with a left, double, and right dot at top. 9 and 0 were a and b shifted to the right and that is, it resembled the 3rd decade with the two bottom dots connected into a line. Decade 7 was formed with a dash in the top row of the cell and that is, it was much like the modern fifth decade with an overstruck dash at the top. Decade 8 was formed by splitting the first decade with a dash and that is, a dash appeared in the middle row, displacing the dots of that row to the bottom of the cell. In the case of first and 3rd characters, which did not have dots in the middle row and that is, this decade was equivalent to adding an overstrike to ⠄⠅⠤⠩⠡⠍⠭⠥⠌⠬. Decade 9 was derived from the fifth by adding a dash in the bottom row and these were left unassigned apart from the first three, which were used when needed as markers of words, music, and plainsong, respectively. Thus the 1st and 5th decades occupied only the top half of the cell, the supplemental signs were ⠄⠤⠜⠼ and a top dash with ⠠⠰. Of the 125 possible patterns,97 were used, the modern 5th decade and other supplemental signs do not appear in the 1829 version of braille, apart from ⠐ and ⠒ in plainsong notation. Punctuation differed slightly from today, even accounting for the shift downward when the dash was dropped from the row of the cell. Anticipating that the dashes might prove problematic, Braille provided that the supplemental sign ⠼ would shift the decade by four and that is, adding it to the first four decades would produce substitutes for the fifth through eighth

7.
International uniformity of braille alphabets
–
The goal of braille uniformity is to unify the braille alphabets of the world as much as possible, so that literacy in one braille alphabet readily transfers to another. A second round of unification was undertaken under the auspices of UNESCO in 1951, Braille arranged his characters in decades, and assigned the 25 letters of the French alphabet to them in order. The characters beyond the first 25 are the source of variation today. In the first decade, only the top four dots are used, Braille is in its origin a numeric code. Louis Braille applied the characters in order to the French alphabet in alphabetical order. As braille spread to other languages, the order was retained and applied to the local script. Therefore, where the alphabetical order differed from that of French, for example, French was based on a 25-letter alphabet without a w. In the United Kingdom, however, French Braille was adopted without such reordering, therefore, any English book published in braille needed to be typeset separately for the United States and the United Kingdom. Similarly, the letters Egyptian Arabic Braille were assigned their forms based on their nearest French equivalents, so that for example Arabic d had the same braille letters as French d. For Algerian Arabic Braille, however, the characters were assigned to the Arabic alphabet according to the Arabic alphabetical order. Thus an Arabic book published in Algeria was utterly unintelligible to blind Egyptians, with the values of its symbols unaltered from those of the original French. Gradually the various reordered and frequency-based alphabets fell out of use elsewhere as well. For example, Greek γ gamma is written ⠛ g, as it is romanized, not ⠉ c, as it is ordered in the alphabet or as it is related historically to the Latin letter c. Occasional assignments are made on grounds, such as Greek ω omega. Correspondences among the basic letters of representative modern braille alphabets include, the additional letters of the extended French braille alphabet, such as ⠯, are not included in the international standard. The French ⠯, for example, corresponds to print ⟨ç⟩, whereas the ⠯ in English and German braille transcribes ⟨&⟩, and the ⠯ in Hungarian and Albanian braille is ⟨q⟩. Such languages include, Bemba, Chewa, Dobuan, Greenlandic, Huli, Indonesian, Luvale, Malagasy, Malaysian, Ndebele, Shona, Swahili, Swazi, Tok Pisin, Tolai, Xhosa, Zulu. In these languages, print digraphs such as ch are written as digraphs in braille too, languages of the Philippines are augmented with the use of the accent point with n, ⠈⠝, for ñ

8.
Braille Patterns
–
In Unicode, braille is represented in a block called Braille Patterns. The block contains all 256 possible patterns of an 8-dot braille cell, in Unicode the braille characters are not defined into any script. That is, the patterns are available as symbols, without connection to a letter or a number. This is because the symbol can be used in multiple scripts, e. g. as a Latin character, a Vietnamese character, a Chinese character. For this reason – a dot-pattern is not a letter – Unicode declares that, strictly speaking, braille patterns are symbols, the General Property is So, not Lo. Beyond that declaration, however, braille is treated as a script in multiple places, E. g. the character property Script for the 256 braille code points is ISO15924 Brai, for braille. This way, searching users and programs are led to the right place, the coding is in accordance with ISO/TR 11548-1 Communication aids for blind persons. Unicode uses the standard dot-numbering 1 to 8, historically only the 6-dot cell was used in braille. The lower two dots were added later, which explains the irregular numbering 1-2-3-7 in the left column, where dots 7 and 8 are not raised, there is no distinction between 6-dot and 8-dot definitions. The Unicode name of a specific pattern mentions the raised dots, by exception, the zero dot raised pattern is named U+2800 ⠀ BRAILLE PATTERN BLANK. In the 8-dot cell each dot individually can be raised or not, by mapping each of the eight dots to a bit in a byte, and by defining 0/1 for not raised/raised per bit, every specific pattern generates an identifying binary number. So the pattern with dots 1-2-5 raised would yield 2, equivalent to 16 or 10, the mapping can also be computed by adding together the hexadecimal values, seen at right, of the dots raised. So the pattern with dots 1-2-5 raised would yield 116+216+1016 =1316, whether computed directly in hexadecimal, or indirectly via binary, the result is added to 280016, the offset for the Braille Patterns Unicode block. There is no regular mapping to the braille ASCII numbering, the Unicode names of braille dot patterns are not the same as what many English speakers would use colloquially. Some English users of braille additionally use the word and when listing only two dots, thus braille pattern dots-45 would be spoken as braille dots 4 and 5. The word and is not always used when listing many dots however, Braille was added to the Unicode Standard in September,1999 with the release of version 3.0. When using punching, the dots are to be punched. The Unicode block for braille is U+2800, the current Unicode charts, and some fonts, use empty circles to indicate dots that are not punched

9.
Amharic Braille
–
Amharic Braille is the braille alphabet of the Amharic language. Letter values are mostly in line with international usage, Amharic Braille is a consonant–vowel alphabet, not an abugida like the print Amharic script. The syllabic chart at right shows a blank cell ⟨⠀⟩ being used for the vowel ⟨ə⟩ and this is perhaps an artefact of the presentation, Unesco shows it as a zero vowel that is simply not written. ⟨ə⟩ is not the default vowel in print Amharic, which is instead ⟨ä⟩. For example, el + vowel is written ለ ⠇⠢ lä, ሉ ⠇⠥ lu, ሊ ⠇⠊ li, ላ ⠇⠁ la, ሌ ⠇⠑ le, ል ⠇ lə, ሎ ⠇⠕ lo, ሏ ⠇⠭ lwa. Note that Cwə is written as if it were Cwu, a sequence which does not occur in Amharic, Amharic digits do not follow the international pattern. They are also circumfixed with ⠁, ⠆, The form of 100 suggests that the prefix ⠁ may occur before each digit, while the suffix ⠆ occurs only at the end of the number. Western numbers are marked with ⠼ as in other braille alphabets, native punctuation is as follows, The last is a tonal mark. There is also Western punctuation, Ethiopic Braille at Adaptive Technology Center for the Blind, Addis Ababa

10.
Armenian Braille
–
Armenian Braille is either of two braille alphabets used for writing the Armenian language. The assignments of the Armenian alphabet to braille patterns is largely consistent with unified braille, with the same punctuation. However, Eastern and Western Armenian are assigned braille letters based on different criteria, the conventions for Western Armenian were developed in Lebanon. In Eastern Armenian, braille cells are assigned values based on the historical correspondences of the Armenian script. For this reason they closely match the Latin transliteration convention used in the table below, in Western Armenian, braille cells are assigned according to a pronunciation which diverges from the historical origin of the letters. Thus what are transliterated b g d in the table below are assigned braille values as p q th, apart from the comma and question mark above, Eastern and Western Braille use the same punctuation

11.
Bharati Braille
–
Bharati braille /ˈbɑːrətiː/ BAR-ə-tee, or Bharatiya Braille, is a largely unified braille script for writing the languages of India. When India gained independence, eleven braille scripts were in use, in different parts of the country, by 1951 a single national standard had been settled on, Bharati braille, which has since been adopted by Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh. There are slight differences in the orthographies for Nepali in India and Nepal, there are significant differences in Bengali Braille between India and Bangladesh, with several letters differing. Sinhalese Braille largely conforms to other Bharati, but differs significantly toward the end of the alphabet, Bharati braille alphabets use a 6-dot cell with values based largely on English Braille. Although basically alphabetic, Bharati braille retains one aspect of Indian abugidas and this has been called a linearized alphasyllabary. For example, and taking Devanagari as a representative printed script, the braille letter ⠅ renders print क ka, to indicate that a consonant occurs without a following vowel, a virama prefix is used, ⠈⠅ is क k, and ⠈⠹ is थ th. However, unlike in print, there are no diacritics in Bharati braille, vowels are written as full letters following the consonant. Thus print क्लिक klika is written in braille as ⠈⠅⠇⠊⠅, the one time a non-initial short a is written in braille is when it is followed by another vowel. In this environment the a must be written, because otherwise the subsequent vowel will be read as following the consonant immediately, thus print ⟨कइ⟩ kai is rendered in braille as ⠅⠁⠊, to disambiguate it from ⠅⠊ for कि ki. Apart from the kṣ and jñ, Bharati braille does not handle conjuncts, consonant clusters written as conjuncts in print are handled with the virama in braille, just as they are with computer fonts that lack the conjuncts. Bharati braille is thus equivalent to Grade-1 English braille, though there are plans to all the Bharati alphabets to include conjuncts. Following are the charts of the correspondences of the main Indian scripts. Irregularities, where a letter does not match the romanized heading, are placed in parentheses, in Hindi, halanta is not used with the last letter when a word ends in a consonant. Some of the punctuation marks duplicate letters, the caps mark is only used when transcribing English. The accent, ⠈, transcribes Urdu ّ shaddah, and the colon, in Bangladesh and Nepal, several additional punctuation marks are noted, but they do not agree with each other. It is not clear which are used in India, the pointing symbol, ⠐, is used for consonant letters that in print are derived by adding a dot to another consonant. For Urdu, the letter in Devanagari is used, the pointing of the Arabic/Persian script is not reflected. For example, Gurmukhi ਗ਼ / Urdu غ / Devanagari ग़ ġa, formed by adding a dot to g in Gurmukhi, with Urdu, this is only done in India

12.
Sinhalese Braille
–
Sinhalese Braille is one of the many Bharati braille alphabets. While it largely conforms to the values of other Bharati alphabets. Sinhala braille just as any other braille code is used in education, the blind community of Sri Lanka is alienating gradually from the use of braille due to a number of reasons. A recent survey reveals that only 15% of blind people use braille, today, braille usage is limited to examination purposes in educational institutions. It is worth inquiring as to what could be the reasons leading to this alienation from braille. However, the key factor is related to the Sinhala braille code. Current Sinhala braille code has its own shortcomings, the drawback being the lack of an efficient set of standard contractions. Users who have exposed to grade 2 English braille realise the importance of establishing a set of standard contractions for Sinhala Braille as well. Care must be taken to create contractions which are appropriate for the present day learners of braille and not complicated, education for the blind started in 1912 when Mary F. Chapman, a missionary lady founded a special school for the deaf and blind at Ratmalana. The use of Sinhala braille too runs as far as the beginning of the 20th century, at the beginning, English characters were used to represent Sinhala letters. The Sinhala alphabet comprises 60 letters whereas English has only 26, moreover, Sinhala has a syllable based alphabet and two English characters had to be used to represent one Sinhala consonant, thus distorting the semblance to sighted print. Therefore, this method was not practical although many continued to use it as there was no alternative at the time. In 1947, the first non-foreign principal of the school for the blind at Ratmalana, dassanaike, introduced a more practical code which was influenced by the principles and practices of the English braille code. Since then, Sinhala braille has played a significant role in education and communication, nevertheless, a grade 2 or braille contraction code had not yet been adapted for Sinhala braille, causing lot of inconvenience in using and storing braille material. Several attempts were made in 1959,1968 and 1997 to introduce Sinhala braille contractions, but, none of these attempts can be observed today. The contractions introduced in 1959, were mere shortening of long words, sufficient consideration was not given to the structure of the Sinhala language. Although, the structure of the language was taken into consideration in contractions introduced in 1968, a large amount of words were contracted in 1997, but it too received the same fate because, some of the contractions were illogical. In addition to these attempts, most braille users use their own methods of contractions

13.
Burmese Braille
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Burmese Braille is the braille alphabet of languages of Burma written in the Burmese script, including Burmese and Karen. Letters that may not seem at first glance to correspond to international norms are more recognizable when traditional romanization is considered. For example, သ s is rendered ⠹ th, which is how it was romanized when Burmese Braille was developed, the first braille alphabet for Burmese was developed by a Father Jackson ca. These aspects have all changed, as have several of the letters for the values which were retained. However, some of the old letters, unusual by international standards, remain, such as ⠌ for င ng, the letters in print Burmese transcribe consonants and, in syllable-initial position, vowels. The consonants each have a letter in braille, but the initial vowels in print are in braille all written ⠰ plus the letter for the appropriate diacritic. The consonant ny has two forms in print which are distinct in braille as well, the stacking of consonants in print is indicated with ⠤ in braille. That is, Burmese Braille has two viramas, one corresponding to print virama, and one corresponding to stacking, for example, ကမ္ဘာ kambha world is written ⠅⠍⠤⠃⠁. For example, The following punctuation is specific to Burmese, Western punctuation presumably uses Western braille conventions

14.
Czech Braille
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Czech Braille is the braille alphabet of the Czech language. Like braille in other Latin-script languages, Czech Braille assigns the 25 basic Latin letters the same as Louis Brailles original assignments for French, with the exception of w, Czech follows international norms for the basic letters of the alphabet. For letters with diacritics, there are two strategies, a dot 6 may be added, or the letter is reversed. The Czech braille letter ř is the form for w, so w has been assigned an idiosyncratic form. É and ě are not derived from e, but are the reverse of each other, the numerical prefix, ⠼, derives the second options in the table. ⠠ indicates a letter, ⠰ that a word is in all caps. There are also prefixes for small and capital Greek letters, ⠘ and ⠨, Ô is equivalent to Czech Braille ů, and it doesnt have the letters ě or ř. In addition, there are four letters not found in Czech Braille, Czech Republic United Organization for the Blind,2006, Slepecká Braillova abeceda

15.
German Braille
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German Braille is one of the older braille alphabets. The French-based order of the letter assignments was largely settled on with the 1878 convention that decided the standard for international braille, however, the assignments for German letters beyond the 26 of the basic Latin alphabet are mostly unrelated to French values. In numerical order by decade, the letters are, The generic accent sign, there are numerous contractions and abbreviations. These can be found in the link in the reference section. Punctuation is as follows, Only the first asterisk is marked with dot 6, so print *** is in braille ⠠⠔⠔⠔. ⠴ is the Artikel sign, for the brackets of phonetic transcription, German Braille uses a modified form, ⠰⠶⠀⠰⠶. Additional punctuation and symbols, especially mathematical, are explained in the reference below. Numbers are introduced with the sign ⠼ and they are dropped to decade 5 for ordinals and for the denominator of fractions. So, for example, ⠼⠙ is ⟨4⟩, while ⠼⠲ is ⟨4. ⟩, the percent sign requires the number sign even after a number, ⠼⠃⠼⠴ ⟨2%⟩, otherwise it would look like the fraction ²⁄₀. In a compound fraction, a repeat of the number sign separate the units from the fraction, the emphasis sign is marked with an extra point, ⠠⠸, when it occurs in the middle of a word. It is doubled, ⠸⠸, when more than one word is emphasized, the all-caps sign is used for initialisms and the like. Doubled, it is used for text, such as titles. Names with initials, such as J. S, bach, do not require the cap sign. Lower-case metric units are marked as lower-case, ⠠⠅⠘⠺ ⟨kW⟩ and this is useful, as it ends the scope of the number sign ⠼, ⠼⠁⠉⠚⠠⠓⠨⠏⠁ ⟨130 hPa⟩, ⠼⠁⠉⠚⠠⠅⠘⠧⠁ ⟨130 kVA⟩. Das System der deutschen Blindenschrift,2005

16.
Hebrew Braille
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Hebrew Braille is the braille alphabet for Hebrew. The International Hebrew Braille Code is widely used and it was devised in the 1930s and completed in 1944. It is based on international norms, with additional letters devised to accommodate differences between English Braille and the Hebrew alphabet, unlike Hebrew, but in keeping with other braille alphabets, Hebrew Braille is read from left to right instead of right to left. And unlike English Braille, it is a Abjad, all consonants, prior to the 1930s, there were several regional variations of Hebrew Braille, but no universal system. In 1936, the Jewish Braille Institute of America assembled a panel to attempt to produce a unified code. Among the greater challenges faced by the panel was the accommodation of the Hebrew vowel points, the code underwent further refinements for the better part of a decade until its completion in 1944. Because Hebrew Braille derives from English Braille, there is not a match between Hebrew letters in print and in braille. Most obviously, four consonants with the point in print have distinct letters in braille. The different placements of the dot on the print letter shin also correspond to two different letters in braille, on the other hand, the distinct final forms of some letters in print are not reflected in braille. For other pointed print consonants, such as gimel with dagesh גּ‎, historically, this sequence has two values, a hard gee, and a double/long gee. However, it is not distinct in Modern Hebrew and it is not clear if the prefix can be added to letters that have partners in the bottom row of the table above to distinguish, say, dagesh hazak kk from dagesh kal k, or ww from û. When transcribing completely unpointed print texts, only the top row of letters is used. Apart from those written with ו‎ and י‎ and thus obligatory in print, when they are written, braille vowels are full letters rather than diacritics. Print digraphs with אְ‎ schwa, and the matres lectionis are derived in braille by modifying the base vowel, יֵ‎ ê does not have a dedicated braille letter, and is written as the vowel ⠌ e plus ⠽ yod. The punctuation used with Hebrew Braille, according to Unesco, is as follows, UNESCO World Braille Usage, 3rd edition

French Braille is the original braille alphabet, and the basis of all others. The alphabetic order of French has become …

Image: DSC 4050 MR Braille

The original French Braille alphabet, according to Loomis (1942). Most accented letters of the 1829 version have been replaced with digraphs, but these are not used today.

The final form of Braille's alphabet, according to Henri (1952). The decade diacritics are listed at left, and the supplementary letters are assigned to the appropriate decade at right. Characters are derived by combining the diacritic on the left with the basic letters at top. "(1)" indicates markers for musical and mathematical notation. Parentheses and quotation marks follow English Braille usage. The number sign is used to create several arithmetical symbols which are no longer in use, or that continue in Antoine notation.

A page from an undated early braille textbook, showing both readings, with additional readings not included in Loomis. It is captioned Écritare à l'usage des Aveugles. Procédé de L. Braille. Professeur à l'institut Nl des Jnes Aveugles.